


Weathervanes

by openended



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Reality, Community: sj_everyday, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:49:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what if things were different?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weathervanes

**I.**

Jack O’Neill doesn’t like scientists. It’s a rule. He doesn’t like scientists of any breed: hard science, social science, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, any kind of –ology or things that require math.

So the fact that he’s spent the last ten minutes staring at Doctor Samantha Carter explain something so far over his head he can’t even see it anymore is a little disturbing. Because he isn’t just staring in the way he normally stares at scientists (blankly and mentally willing them to hurry it the hell up), he’s almost _ogling_. And that skirt may be boring and basic, but it sure hugs her in all the right places and she’s ditched her jacket and those are some very dangerous curves. He shakes his head to clear his mind because even though he isn’t expected to understand this, he’s at least supposed to have heard it.

The meeting adjourns, predictably without any follow-up questions, and she flashes a smile at all of them before disappearing out the door and down the stairs to do God-knows-what in her lab for the rest of the day.

“Ask her out already,” Daniel grouses next to him.

“What?” Jack turns his stare on Daniel. Except it’s a _what the hell are you talking about_ stare, not the mental undressing he was doing of Doctor Carter.

“Sam. Ask her out. Or stop being so obvious about it.”

“I am not being obvious.”

“Uh huh. What was that meeting about?”

Jack turns his stare into a glare. “Goa’uld. And magnets.”

“No, it was about DHD field repair. What color was her necklace?”

“Silver,” Jack answers before realizing that he firmly painted himself into a corner. “I am not obvious.”

“I believe that if you were to ask Doctor Carter to spend time with you in a social manner she would not say no, O’Neill.”

“Not you, too.”

Teal’c merely raises an eyebrow.

“I am not obvious,” Jack repeats.

 **II.**

Sam reluctantly breaks her lips away from his and rests her forehead against his shoulder. She hadn’t intended to end the evening kissing Jack O’Neill.

She hadn’t actually intended to go on a date with Jack O’Neill either, but that plan was blown out of the water when he asked her to dinner. The woman inside of her who had been quietly admiring him from a distance for months had easily overridden the exterior scientist who (ostensibly) didn’t mix work with pleasure. She smiles, feeling him press a kiss against her temple. “Want to come up?”

Again, not in the plan. Asking Jack O’Neill up to her apartment (which she isn’t sure she’s been in for more than five minutes at a time over the past week, so the state of things is a bit hazy) was something she told herself in the shower at the base that she would most certainly not be doing.

Jack chuckles lowly and rubs her back. “I’d better not.”

“Early mission?” She searches her brain for the offworld schedule and comes up empty. She really needs to get out of her lab more often.

He crinkles his nose in mock disgust and nods.

Sam checks the big clock embedded in the side of her building – almost eleven. He lives forty-five minutes away from her, and almost half an hour away from the base. She, on the other hand, lives ten minutes away from the mountain. “You could stay,” she says, miraculously cutting herself off before babbling about departure times and shortest distances and triangulation.

He tilts his head and captures her lips again, trailing his hands up her sides, casually brushing her breasts. She gasps into his mouth and he feels her shiver despite the warm summer night. “Okay,” he whispers.

 **III.**

“Maybe we should get married.”

Sam blinks and raises her eyes from the report propped up on her stomach. “Excuse me?” In all the conversations they’ve had about the future, especially now with a baby on the way, marriage has not once come up.

Jack simply gestures with the remote to her rounded belly.

“My dad isn’t holding a shotgun to your head, you know.”

“Your dad’s a Tok’ra council member and a retired Air Force General.”

“And on the other side of the galaxy.”

He shrugs and changes the channel. “Just a suggestion.”

Sam manages to read an entire sentence before transferring her focus to Jack again. “Are you trying to ask me to marry you without actually asking?”

“More like testing the water,” he says quickly. Sam’s pretty low-maintenance (and he loves that about her), but he knows that if he were actually going to propose, he’d need to do better than _maybe we should get married_.

She nods and purses her lips together, pretending to think hard about it. “Maybe after Baby’s born.”

“Okay,” Jack says, and slides his arm around her shoulders.

 **IV.**

He showers first, and scrubs his skin raw in effort to get rid of the dirt and grime and blood, some of which isn’t his. He flips off the light and steps out into their bedroom, clad in boxers and a t-shirt. It takes his eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness, the room lit only by ambient street light. Sam’s sitting on their bed, cross-legged and already in pajamas.

“I can’t do this,” he says quietly, running a hand through his damp hair.

Sam looks up at him and blinks expectantly, waiting for him to go on.

“Disappearing for days, getting shot at, leaving you two behind. Having Hammond tell you that we’re three days overdue for check-in. People died on this one, Sam, a lot of people. What happens when it’s me?”

Sam stands and walks the few steps over to him. She reaches up and cups his face with her hand, gently stroking his cheek with her thumb until he looks at her. “ _If_ it’s ever you,” she whispers, correcting the verb, “if you are ever the one to be carried back through the gate.” She pauses and swallows, trying to hide the tremble in her voice. “It will be unimaginable. It will hurt like hell and I will yell at your dead body for being so damn stupid that you forgot to duck. But we will survive.”

Jack smiles, knowing that she really would yell at his corpse for not ducking. The smile is short lived when he sees a tear drop down her cheek. He reaches out and brushes it away and remembers the beginning of this conversation. “I can’t do this, Sam. I can’t do the planets and the shooting and the fighting. I can’t take care of my family when I’m freezing my butt off on some rock on the other side of the galaxy.”

Sam steps away and crosses her arms. She lifts her chin and holds his gaze. “Jack O’Neill. Emma doesn’t need you to stick your head in the sand and ignore the bad guys and stay home with her to play kickball in the backyard or scribble crayon all over the living room wall. What she needs is for her father to go out there and fight the bad guys so some egomaniac with a snake in his head won’t land in the front yard one day.”

“Sam…”

“No. Don’t you get it? Your job, Jack, is to be on that godforsaken cold and rainy rock on the other side of the galaxy so that our daughter never has to worry about everything that you see out there coming true for her.” She uncrosses her arms and reaches out to him, grasping his hand. “You had a bad mission,” she says, softening her voice. “A crappy one. And I’m sorry. I really am. But you can’t quit, Jack. You know that.”

 **V.**

She’s never really understood her parents. They’re too different, and not the kind of different that makes sense; the kind where one’s loud and the other’s quiet and they tug each other into some sort of comfortable middle ground, or the kind where one always votes Republican and the other always votes Democrat but they manage to agree on school board elections.

Sometimes she thinks they drive each other crazy.

More than once she’s caught her mother with a clenched jaw and hurt eyes after a door closes, hiding yet another nightmare she doesn’t understand or her father cursing under his breath at the mountain of paperwork and books and computers and calculators that takes over their kitchen table in moments of stress.

But she also sees the quiet knock on the bathroom door, the whispered _can I do anything_ that’s quickly followed by the door opening and closing again, murmured calming words and muffled sobs. She knows she’s on her own for breakfast those days. She also sees the pattern and care with which the papers are gathered up, the work saved, and the Post-Its stuck as bookmarks as the kitchen table is cleared away for dinner. She knows dinner will be takeout and she’ll have to ask someone else about her perplexing chemistry homework.

She dreads the days when her mother comes home from work late and her father is mysteriously “away on work” or “on a mission.” She doesn’t know what they do all day – and she gets the “deep space telemetry” and “I work for the Air Force” answers when she does ask, until she’s old enough to look up what deep space telemetry really is and sneak a look at her mother’s notes and realize that it’s all total bullshit – but she knows that when he’s gone, her mother’s supposed to be home in time for dinner unless something’s wrong.

She asked him, once, why he doesn’t come home when he’s supposed to; told him that it made her mother sad and worried and she didn’t understand why everyone else’s dad goes away for business on Monday and comes home on Friday and the only problem might be if it snows in Chicago. He’d smiled at her, sadly, and said that it wasn’t that kind of business.

She’s approached by an Air Force Major while she’s frantically trying to finish her doctoral thesis. He finds her in the library, in the cubicle she’s been granted by the university, and has trouble finding a clear space to sit down. The Air Force made her childhood kind of strange, so she’s not terrifically pleased to see an officer wanting to speak to her when she hasn’t slept in several days and the coffee bar downstairs isn’t open yet. He offers her a job, at something called Stargate Command and she recognizes the logo on the paper as one she saw years ago when she’d accidentally woken up her mother’s laptop while trying to clear off the table.

It’s three in the morning, on an unassuming Wednesday in December, when she finally understands her parents. She’s sitting in the middle of the living room, in an apartment she hasn’t even begun to unpack yet, surrounded by mission reports that all cite her mother and father (and Uncle Daniel and Uncle Murray – Teal’c – and she _knew_ there was something not quite human about him). Some of them are simple, most of them are not. But for every misstep she remembers growing up, there’s perfect synchrony on the pages in front of her.

As she drives to work the next day, still unprepared for the awe and wonder that will greet her several stories underground, she smiles.

Find a connection like theirs, and any damn thing can fly.


End file.
